Hello all,

I have a Dell R610 server which has 2 146gb hard drives. I was told that they are not mirrored. One of the two is now blinking green/amber. I assume this means the drive is on it's way out. I ran an fdisk -l to see the different mounted devices, but I only see /dev/sda which is split into sda1 (boot) and sda2 (other partitions) for a total of 146gb, so it seems to me like the server is "missing" a HDD?

Your server has a hardware RAID controller. The controller manages the RAID array and usually presents a single logical drive to the OS.

If the drives aren't mirrored, then the broken drive must be unassigned, or so badly broken that it isn't even visible to the controller. It's much more likely that the drives are configured as a RAID 1 mirror set.

You should be able to determine the actual drive configuration by running the RAID management software.

(If you're managing this server, you really need to know these things.)

This stuff was here way before me.

Is it possible to run the utility without rebooting the machine? There is software running that cannot be shutdown at the present time.

I'm not familiar with Dell Linux software, but sure, you should certainly be able to see the status of all drives as well as any RAID arrays. You should also be able to configure notifications, perform manual expansions and rebuilds etc.

As I said, I don't know the specifics when it comes to Dell server hardware (such as what they actually call their management software), but hopefully the software is already installed. If it isn't, then (somebody hasn't been doing his/her job, and) you should be able to find what you need here. RHEL is supported, so you should be able to run software for the equivalent RHEL version on CentOS.